Grant agencies are always interested in the use figures for our
existing NMR instruments. How do you calculate and report them? I
have always based percent use on the basis of 24-7 (168 hrs/wk) being
100%. I can subtract a little from this denominator for maintenance
and down time, but it still makes our percent use look pretty bad,
and I get criticized for using this method.
Apparently Brookhaven has a different way to calculate percent use on
its beamlines which removes holidays from the calendar, but I don't
think that would help much. The fact is that graduate students and
postdocs no longer seem to be willing to put their sleeping bags on
the floor and wait until 3 a.m. to run an NMR spectrum. In my
experience 27% use (9 am - 6 pm M-F) is a pretty good number and
numbers over 30% begin to lead to bitching and finger-pointing among
users. Higher use numbers are possible on big (600+) machines
because they are dominated by long-term experiments (1-3 days or
more) where the user is not present most of that time. But for
routine applications appropriate for synthetic chemists, it's hard to
get more than 30%.
I'm interested to know how you report NMR use, especially in grant
applications, and what you consider to be a "heavily used" machine
vs. moderate or light use.
Thanks!
Neil
Neil E. Jacobsen, Ph.D.
NMR Facility Manager
Department of Chemistry
119 Old Chemistry
1306 E. University
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
520-621-8146
FAX 520-621-8407
Received on Tue Apr 22 2008 - 11:16:09 MST